I work as web developer and have Firefox and Chrome installed on my Ubuntu system. However, most of the nightmares for web developers are getting things to work on Internet Explorer, mostly IE7 and IE8. My entire team of developers have switched to Ubuntu and now we're facing a difficult time with testing on IE. I'd like to be able to test from my own desktop, but not install virtualbox on each system, since that would defeat the purpose of moving to Ubuntu. Is it possible to have windows run on a virtual box instance on one server and remotely connect to it from say 5 or 6 systems at the same time? Or even run windows on one box and have my entire team remotely access that desktop?

I do web development on Ubuntu. I think there are three main scenarios.

If you need to keep an eye on IE's rendering of your HTML and CSS, you can use a site such as Browsershots. Browsershots in particular is very exhaustive but quite slow, there are a few faster equivalents that will only do most major browsers. Also, you can use VNC for this purpose. VNC is not really suitable for interaction with websites, but just fine for static rendering checks.

If you need to test interaction with jQuery-style effects and more complex things, you really need a real local copy of IE, especially if you need to see how responsive an UI is. I use VirtualBox for this. Funny ways of installing IE on Linux don't really work because font rendering and options might be different from vanilla Windows installs. If you need to do this right, you need a real Windows machine (and different Windows versions, too). For example, a tricky bit I ran into lately is when using @font-face server provided fonts. These can vary widely from one platform to the next.

And last but not least, you might need functionality testing (i.e. ¿Did this search box break in the last update?). You can do automated testing of functionality using specialized tools like Selenium or the newer Sikuli. With these you can have Windows tests running automatically on a dedicated machine, but you won't get feedback on small rendering glitches and such.

I was thinking VNC, because most of what I want is the small quirks like stuff. We do have exhaustive testing done on a Windows machine, but that's not what I'd do for quirks
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NigelNov 19 '10 at 16:15

Being a web developer myself I see your problem, I have used one of three solutions at various times.

Use a virtual machine

Dual boot

Have a spare machine set up just for that reason, to test your work under the windows environment

There are a few other things you could try, such as remote desktop, which I believe if you use a server you can have multiple sessions at once. I just don't know how many. Or you could take a look at IEs4Linux. One of their goals is to make IE available on Linux for web developers. The biggest drawback to it is it doesn't support IE 7 and up.